You said you knew the girl with Hoplite's Syndrome. She had been previously the freckled adolescent who'd walked along dirt roads, now in line with a string of other ex-POW's (they had been instructed to extend one arm (the left) back and one arm (the right) forth and hold each other's hands like schoolchildren. None smiled) and I thought immediately about marrying her, perhaps, if she did not have Hoplite's Syndrome. And, perhaps, if she did have Hoplite's Syndrome. I remember allowing myself that moment, gazing intently at the still-freckled nose, the frazzled and beautifully abused hair, the sheet of skin completely covering and filling the ear canal (the Hoplitic growth, in non-medical terms, but used by doctors anyway). She was earthen beauty that had never been taught--or perhaps, had been taught but immediately dismissed the information as non-informative, as if someone had in fact been speaking to her from somewhere, but was so vague and ethereal that, if she'd ever given it a conscious thought, would have regarded the lesson as a daydream. She made me want to weep. Though we had won the day and survived, always a soldier's true perogative, and though you stood next to me with your bolt-action rifle and your red star cloth cap and your wedding ring given to you by my best friend, and though my own machine gun with the side-fed horizontal magazine felt reassuring as ever, I had never felt worse in my life. How did she feel? Never having heard from anyone, never allowed phone calls, forced into the hermitage of her eyesight, then taken prisoner by the Chinese (I had adamantly refused to speculate as to what they may have done to her, my muted darling, who had never shaved, plucked, scraped, sprayed, ripped, and never a thought about her complete lack of social wherewithal) and now on parade in front of me in the green fatigues the Chinese had given her. The Chinese wore green. The Russians wore red. Since the birth of the nation, had not Russia stretched itself across the countryside and cityside in a rush of decadent redness?

Just before the war started and a few of us lived in the greenlands, Brady told me I should do the things that I had occupied myself with as a child. We played baseball. I missed the ball with the little, childlike aluminum bat.

Brady and I playing baseball in the hedgerows. 9-foot hedge walls 2 shades deeper green than the lighter grass hedgerow floor. One could hear whales spraying seawater into the sky which was the palest blue in the world even at mid-afternoon. In the greenlands, we were gods of youth.

Thank heaven I was killed before I had a chance to make the deaf savage girl my own. The joys of cradling her in my arms, of watching her sleep her rustic-dreamed sleep, of nuzzling her when she cried and seeing the cold, palest green fury in her eyes, pointed at me and no other, were, mercifully, never given to me in the form of opportunities of free will.

The battle at which I was killed was in Inner-Mongolia and was huge, with several hundred thousand troops involved. A series of hills gave way subtly to plains of the same texture. The hill my squad came over on recon from the shaded, leeward side, as you watched by an accidental glance from another running hill just after the fighting had started, was never touched by mortars; they killed us with rifle bullets. We'd spent the previous evening smiling, pestered by cold, clear chinooks. We'd looked at the stars through the holes in People's Republic-made tents. Our hill, in the daytime, was the ugliest green I'd ever seen, but I was bitterly disappointed and, worse even, unable to recapture that shrugging and secretly content feeling for my inevitable death, prior to 30, that I had held previously, when, laying sprawled on my back and tasting blood in my mouth and feeling blood down my chin, I saw that it was the same sky I was forced to remember, the palest pale blue in the world. She was oblivious and she would never change.